In 1492, Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Western Hemisphere in The Bahamas. He encountered friendly Lucayan Indians and exchanged gifts with them.
Spanish slave traders later captured the native Indians to work in gold mines in Hispaniola, and within 25 years, all Lucayans had perished. Without a source of slaves, the Spanish did not bother to colonize the islands.
About Bahamas | Bahamas History | Bahamas Culture
In 1647 during the time of the English Civil War, a group of Puritan religious refugees from the royalist colony of Bermuda, the Eleutheran Adventurers, founded the first permanent European settlement in the Bahamas and gave Eleuthera Island its name. Similar groups of settlers formed governments in the Bahamas, but the isolated cays sheltered pirates and wreckers through the 17th century. After Charles Town was destroyed by a joint French and Spanish fleet in 1703, the local pirates proclaimed an anarchic “Privateers' Republic” with Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, as the chief magistrate.
When the islands became a British Crown Colony in 1717, the first Royal Governor was a reformed pirate named Woodes Rogers. He brought law and order to The Bahamas in 1718, when he expelled the buccaneers who had used the islands as hideouts. After the American Revolution the British government issued land grants to a group of British Loyalists, and the sparse population of The Bahamas tripled in a few years. The planters thought to grow cotton, but the soil was unsuited, and the plantations soon failed. Many of the current inhabitants are descended from the slave population brought to work on the Loyalist plantations. When the U.K. outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy began intercepting ships and depositing freed slaves in The Bahamas. Plantation life was finished after the emancipation of remaining slaves in 1834.
During the American Civil War, The Bahamas prospered as a center for Confederate blockade-running, bringing out cotton for the mills of England and running in arms and munitions. After World War I, the islands served as a base for rumrunners to America while Prohibition lasted. After Havana was closed to American tourists in 1961, the Bahamas has developed into a major tourist resort, at the same time as the establishment of Freeport as a free trade zone developed an off-shore financial services center.
Bahamians achieved self-government through a series of constitutional and political steps, attaining internal self-government in 1964 and full independence within the Commonwealth of Nations on July 10, 1973. The non-resident Queen of the Bahamas (Queen Elizibeth of England) is the ceremonial head of state, represented by a Bahamian governor-general. The Prime Minister is the head of government and is the leader of the party with the most seats in the elected House of Assembly.